Kynam – The World’s Rarest, Most Expensive Wood

When you think of the rarest, most precious materials on Earth, things like diamonds, platinum, or gold probably pop into your head, but did you know that a special type of wood is actually more expensive than any of those?

Kynam, or “kyara” as it’s known in Japan, is an extremely rare type of agarwood used in the perfume and incense industries for its complex and very strong fragrance. It is the most sought-after type of “oud”, the name used in the Arab peninsula to describe the dark resinous wood produced in the heartwood of the aquilaria tree, in specific circumstances. A single gram of kynam can fetch well over $10,000, making it by far the most expensive wooden on the planet, and also one of the most expensive natural materials.

Essentially, kynam is the best kind of agarwood that money can buy, and it’s important that all types of agarwood are relatively expensive. Also known as aloeswood, eaglewood, or simply oud, agarwood has been an important part of Chinese, Japanese, Indian, Arab and Southeast-Asian cultures for thousands of years. It has always been a precious commodity, but demand for it has increased dramatically in recent years, and with it, the price.

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Indian Man Seeks Divorce From Wife Because She Doesn’t Bathe Daily

A Muslim man from India’s Uttar Pradesh reportedly tried to divorce his wife of two years because she doesn’t bathe daily, and they fight every time he asks her to.

Personal hygiene is an important part of a relationship, and in some cases, it can become a serious enough issue to warrant the end of said relationship. Case in point, a Muslim man in India who decided to divorce his wife because she refused to bathe every day. He claimed to have repeatedly asked his wife to bathe more often, but every time the issue came up, their discussion ended in a verbal spat. Ultimately, he turned to the controversial “triple talaq” to break off the marriage, even though the two had a one-year-old child together.

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Japan Starts Selling World’s First Genome-Edited Tomato

Sicilian Rouge High GABA is a special type of tomato designed to contain high levels of gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA), an amino acid believed to aid relaxation and help lower blood pressure.

Tokyo-based startup Sanatech Seed Co. teamed up with scientists at the University of Tsukuba to develop a new variety of tomatoes using CRISPR/Cas9 gene-editing technology. Named Sicilian Rouge High GABA, this new type of tomato contains five to six times the normal level of a type of amino acid called gamma-aminobutyric acid, or GABA. According to Japanese media, the company removed an inhibitory domain within the tomato’s genome to enable it to produce these high levels of GABA.

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The Jumping Mailmen of Lake Geneva

Every year, athletic youths in Wisconsin’s Woworth County try out for a unique summer job – mail jumping. They need to prove that they can jump off of a moving boat onto a private dock, deliver the mail and then jump back on the boat before it has passed by.

The residents of Lake Geneva have been getting mail delivered by boat since before roads were built in the area, so the practice has become somewhat of a local tradition, one that attracts loads of tourists to the area. In fact, during the summer months, the mail boat can take approximately 160 tourists along on mail delivery runs and operates at full capacity almost every day. Watching and recording the jumping mailmen deliver the mail to the around 60 homes on Lake Geneva is something that many will gladly pay to be able to do.

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Buffalo Horn Cupping Makes Users Look Like a Super Mario Character

The benefits of cupping as a way to relieve stress, improve athletic performance and overall health have been debated at nauseam, but did you know cupping could help you cosplay as popular Nintendo villain Bowser, aka King Koopa?

Although modern cupping is usually associated with the use of glass cups, the practice can be traced back to the year 1500 B.C., when glass didn’t even exist. Back then, healers used hollowed-out animal horns to create suction, and even though bamboo and glass cups became mainstream in recent times, some street therapists still rely on buffalo horns to practice their trade. As you can see, the visual effect is quite striking.

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Competitive Pillow Fighting – How a Children’s Game Became a Popular Sport in Japan

Every year, dozens of teams from all over Japan travel to the Japanese town of Ito to compete in one of the world’s most unique sporting events – All-Japan Pillow Fighting Championships.

Pillow fighting is an age-old pastime practiced by children of all ages all over the world. Japan is no different, only here the game has been elevated to the status of national sport, with teams made up of people of all ages competing against each other for fame and fortune. After first battling it out in regional qualifying events, winning teams meet up in the small fishing town of Ito, south of Tokyo, to compete in the All-Japan Pillow Fighting Championships, for the title of Japan’s best pillow fighters.

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Man Turns Himself In 30 Years After Escaping From Prison

An Australian man who had been on the run for nearly three decades turned himself in recently, after being rendered homeless by the pandemic and struggling to find work.

On the night of August 1, 1992, 13 months into his three-and-a-half-year sentence for growing marijuana, Darko “Dougie” Desic escaped from the Grafton Correctional Centre in New South Wales, using tools, including a hacksaw blade and bolt cutters. Despite an extensive search, authorities were never able to locate Desic, and he remained a fugitive for the next 29 years. So imagine everyone’s surprise when he just turned up at a police station one day to turn himself in after all this time. As it turns out, it was all because of the Covid-19 pandemic, as the lockdown in NSW had left Desic homeless and with no way to support himself.

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YouTuber Documents Raising Piglet for 100 Days Before Allegedly Eating It on Camera

A Japanese YouTuber recently sparked controversy after apparently cooking and eating a piglet that he had raised on camera for the previous 100 days.

In May of this year, a Japanese man started a peculiar YouTube channel named “Eating Pig After 100 Days“. True to its name, the channel was all about raising a small piglet for 100 days, before cooking and eating it. The idea was intriguing enough to attract a decent audience of over 100,000 on the world’s most popular video platform, but few of its followers actually believed the man behind the project would actually go through with it. After all, what kind of monster would slaughter and eat the adorable piglet that won the hearts of so many, right? Well…

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The World’s Rarest Flower Only Grows in Two Locations Around the World

“Middlemist’s Red,” also known as the spring rose, is widely regarded as the world’s rarest flower, as just two of these precious plants exist, one in New Zealand and another in the UK.

Named after John Middlemist, who collected it in China in 1804, the Middlemist’s Red camelia was always a rare flower that could only be found in the stately English homes of well-off families who could afford to buy them. Middlemist himself donated his specimen to Kew Gardens, but it somehow vanished, along with the others throughout London and the whole of the UK, with the exception of one place. By 1823, the Chiswick House & Gardens, a stately home in England, became the only place in the UK where a Middlemist’s Red could be admired.

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Swedish Couple Banned From Naming Baby ‘Vladimir Putin’

The Swedish tax agency, Skatteverket, rejected a young couple’s request to name their son Vladimir Putin, the name of the famous Russian president.

Public radio broadcaster SR recently reported the case of a couple based in Laholm, Sweden, who were banned from naming their newborn son after Russia’s president. Skatteverket didn’t explain exactly why they rejected the naming request, but according to Swedish law, names should not be offensive or risk causing problems for the bearer, nor are first names that clearly resemble surnames allowed. It wasn’t immediately clear what category “Vladimir Putin’ fell into, but the couple was forced to go for something less controversial.

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Man Claims to Have Been Sleeping Just 30 Minutes a Day for the Last 12 Years

Daisuke Hori, a 36-year-old man from Japan, has spent the last few years training his mind and body to function on as little sleep as possible. He claims to get just 30 minutes of sleep a day and not get tired at all.

Do you ever feel like there aren’t enough hours in the day, and that you’d rather shun sleep so you can do the things you like? Well, that’s probably most people, but few of us actually go through with that idea. Daisuke Hori is one such man. He claims to have lowered his daily sleep time from about 8 hours a day to just 30 minutes, without suffering any of the severe side-effects associated with sleep deprivation. He is the chairman of the “Japan Short-sleeper Association” and now teaches others how to lower their daily sleeping time so they can enjoy life more.

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Al Naslaa – Saudi Arabia’s Mysterious Rock Formation

Saudi Arabia’s Tayma Oasis is home to a 4,000-year-old geological mystery – a strange rock formation perfectly split down the middle with the precision of a laser beam.

The world-famous Al Naslaa rock formation is made up of two large sandstone boulders supported by a natural pedestal that appears much too small for its purpose. But what really draws people’s attention is the perfect split between the two boulders, which appears to have been done with a powerful laser beam. The almost flawless split has inspired lots of speculation on the internet, with some suggesting that Al Naslaa is proof that ancient civilizations may have been more advanced than history tells us.

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Real Goldy Locks – Rapper Claims to Have Implanted Gold Chains Into His Head

Mexican rapper Dan Sur has been getting a lot of attention lately, not because of his music, but because of his drastic physical transformation – replacing his natural hair with metal gold chains implanted into his head.

With the internet and social media constantly producing new artists and influencers, it’s hard to get noticed unless you do something truly extreme. Face tattoos, diamond-studded grillz, multicolored hair, it’s all been done before, so attention seekers really have to get creative. Dan Sur, a young from Mexico, seems to have found one such creative, albeit shocking, way of standing out from the crowd – replacing his natural locks with gold chains allegedly implanted into his skull.

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Political Candidate Forced to Run Against Doppelgangers Who Also Stole His Name

An opposition party candidate running for a municipal position in St Petersburg, Russia, is competing against at least two other people who not only legally changed their names to his, but also borrowed his physical appearance to confuse voters.

Russian opposition politicians are used to running against candidates with the same surname, it’s a commonly used tactic that can derail a few precious votes in close elections, but Boris Vishnevsky’s case stands out. A senior member of the liberal Yabloko party running for public office in a district of Saint Petersburg, Vishnevsky already knew that two of his opponents had recently changed their names to “Boris Vishnevsky” to confuse voters. What he didn’t know was that they’d stolen his look as well. In a district voting poster showing the three candidates side by side, it’s difficult to tell them apart, because they all look nearly identical.

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Mother Makes 13-year-Old Girl Jump Rope 3,000 Times Per Day to Grow Taller

A 13-year-old girl was diagnosed with a serious joint disease caused by being forced to jump rope 3,000 times a day by her mother, as a bizarre way of growing taller.

Chinese media recently reported the case of a 13-year-old girl in Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province who developed traction apophysitis of the tibial tubercle after being forced by her mother to jump rope 3,000 a day in order to get taller. The girl had complained to her mother of knee pain, but she was initially accused of being lazy and was only taken to see a doctor after her symptoms worsened. After performing a physical checkup, doctors ruled out a meniscus injury but warned the mother that excessive exercise can cause serious injuries in children.

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